


little miss perfect

by Murf1307



Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Drunken Kissing, F/F, F/M, Implied/Referenced Cheating, M/M, One-Sided Rivalry, basically Scott Summers has no lines but is Scott Summers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-04
Updated: 2015-01-04
Packaged: 2018-03-05 06:51:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3110159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Murf1307/pseuds/Murf1307
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emma Frost hates Jean Grey, and has every intention of beating her this year in Mock Trial, even though they're on the same team.  It...does not go according to plan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	little miss perfect

**Author's Note:**

> written for a pairing/au prompt asking for emma/jean as rivals in mock trial.

It’s senior year, and Emma Frost has one goal: go head to head with Jean Grey, redheaded golden girl of the mock trial team, and beat her at her own game.  She’s  _going_  to do it, there’s no question; when Emma decides she wants to do something, she’s going to do it.

After all, Jean has it all — beauty, brains, friends, that weirdly hot math nerd with the glasses that she’s dating, probably a free ride to an Ivy if she’s aiming for that.  Emma just has her money, her wits and her looks and the fact that guys either want her in the back of their tiny, cramped used cars or they’re too intimidated by her to even look in her direction without crying in slightly turned-on fear.

But by god, it’s going to be enough.  Emma frost is going to unseat little Miss Grey at this, just you watch.

—

Jean’s not sure what’s up with Emma Frost.  The girl joined the mock trial team last year, and she’s  _brilliant_  at it.  No one ever took to everything that fast.  But she never seems to want to talk to anyone, looks at everyone like they’re beneath her.  

It’s awful, because Jean would like to be her friend, if only she could get past how much the other girl seems to hate her, specifically.

So she starts conferring with Warren about it.  Warren and Emma seem to get on okay, at least superficially, and if there’s any way to get past all of Emma’s walls, she’s sure he would know.

"I…don’t know.  She’s just always been like that?" Warren tells her.  "She just doesn’t like people, Jeannie."

Jean bites the inside of her cheek and sets to work on fixing that.

—

Whatever Little Miss Perfect is doing  _is not_ going to shake Emma’s resolve.  It doesn’t matter that Jean brought cookies to the meeting and then had the  _gall_  to offer her the first one, like she had something to  _prove._

Ugh.

It doesn’t matter.  Emma’s going to win this.

The first practice case of the year, though, they’re put on the same team, set up against weedy, lanky Hank McCoy, nicknamed  _Beast_ for reasons Emma hasn’t yet discerned, and Warren Worthington III.

Emma hates Warren a little less than she hates the others, maybe.  At least, he’s entertaining, with his hopeless crush on Grey’s boyfriend, and all.

They take down their opponents to handily that McCoy offers to shake her hand, saying, “We really shouldn’t have expected any less from our star lead attorneys.”

—

If anything, Emma’s gotten  _mor_ _e_ unmanageable since the first practice case.  Jean had asked Dr. Xavier to fix the assignments a little, saying that she thought she and Emma could both use a change of pace, and it would be interesting to work with her.

It’s so frustrating, because Emma’s unadulterated  _loathing_  is hard to deal with.  Plus, there’s the fact that she’s started hitting on Scott, which upsets Scott — because he doesn’t know how to deal with it — Warren — because he  _also_  wants to be dating Scott, and has wanted that since freshman year — and, weirdly enough, everyone’s weird older friend Logan, who doesn’t go to this school and probably never did, but he has a car and is oddly protective of everyone.

Jean…doesn’t like it.  But she’s not exactly  _upset_ about it.  If Emma likes Scott, that’s her business.  She trusts Scott not to cheat on her, so it doesn’t really matter.

But she can’t help but wish things were different, she thinks to herself as she pulls a pan of cookies out of the oven at midnight the night before their last practice before the first competition.  If only it were possible.

—

Something changes, though Emma refuses to outright realize it, when they go to the first competition of the school year, held at a school a couple of districts away.  Some disgusting  _boy_  — at least three steps down the desirability scale from even the worst of the ones they normally deal with — starts hitting on Jean while the boys aren’t paying attention.

Jean, of course, is trying to be nice to him.  Because she’s like that.  She’s trying to let him down gently.

Emma can see the boy isn’t budging, and while Jean can fend for herself, Emma knows, it seems gauche to have seen it and not do something.  

So she strides over, dark skirt an inch shorter, heels half an inch higher than most girls at a competition like this, white blouse impeccably starched, and gets in his face.

"You couldn’t bag a girl like Jean Grey if you were the last man alive," she informs him, not mincing words.  "She’s being kind by not saying so herself."

"Emma, please," Jean says.  "You don’t have to…"

But the boy scuttles back like he’s just seen the face of god.

Ugh.  Boys.

Emma doesn’t acknowledge that Jean spoke to her; she just walks back to the refreshment table to find a sandwich that  _doesn’t_  look like it tastes like the rear end of a goat.

—

Jean is going to tear out her hair over Emma Frost.  First the girl hates her, then she tries to steal her boyfriend, now she compliments her?  And to scare off some boy who was just kind of slimy and that none of them would probably see again?

It doesn’t make sense at all.

Jean spends the bus ride home from the competition — which they’d won, with Emma delivering the final closing with a dry acerbic wit that Jean has never been able to master — sitting in the back, trying to figure out what Emma wants out of all of this.

Because obviously, Emma isn’t the type of person to spell it out.

—

They have a ‘non-denominational holiday celebration’ just before Christmas, with a bowl of spiked punch that leads to Scott and Warren under the mistletoe, looking for all the world like there’s no place they’d rather be.

Emma wants to slap them both, but she’s not quite drunk enough.

And she’s not sure  _why_  she wants to, either.  This kind of thing should be exactly what she wants to achieve her goal.  She wants to ruin everything for Jean, wants to beat her at her own game.

So she should be  _pleased_  that Scott and Warren are drunkenly locking lips in the doorway.

But instead, she wants to slap them both, and she doesn’t know why.

—

Jean breaks up with Scott the day before New Year’s Eve, to spare him the guilt of admitting what he’d done with Warren, citing that she’s too busy for a relationship right now, and she feels bad she doesn’t really have enough time to give him what he deserves.

And that’s true enough, so she doesn’t feel too bad about it.  She goes home and calls up Ororo, but Ororo’s spending the night at T’Challa’s place, which leaves Jean with no plans for the evening.

She sits down with Netflix and a quart of ice cream, trying to remind herself that she did the right thing.

She’s not expecting Emma to show up, knocking on her bedroom window, bearing more ice cream.

—

Emma isn’t sure why she’s doing this, but she heard from Warren that Jean had broken up with Scott, and she just…she hadn’t needed to think about it, and now she’s here, on the night before New Year’s Eve, knocking on Jean’s bedroom window like she has any right at all to be there.

"Emma?" Jean asks, opening the window.  "What are you doing here?"

"I heard you had a breakup."  It’s true, it’s the entirety of the truth.

Jean looks at her in confusion, and Emma’s stomach drops a little.  Of course.  Jean believes Emma hates her.  And Emma does hate her, why is she doing this?

She can’t even answer for herself.  

"Do you wanna watch  _Heathers_ , or  _Carrie_?” Jean asked, finally, opening the window enough for Emma to climb through.

They wind up picking  _Carrie._

—

Jean wakes up the next morning curled up against a still-sleeping Emma.  Emma’s hair is mussed and her makeup’s a little smudged — there’s some lipstick on Jean’s bedspread, in fact, in a shade redder than any Jean would wear herself.

She looks beautiful.

Jean bites her lip and wonders if this is going to be a problem — she doesn’t know where she stands with this girl, doesn’t even know if Emma’s  _into_  girls.

But Emma is lying next to her on top of the covers, and the TV is still on, and Jean thinks that she might not be able to stop herself from falling for this girl.

—

It’s embarrassing.  It’s embarrassing and humiliating and Emma is never going to be able to look Jean Grey in the face again.

She’d woken up on top of the other girl’s bed, practically half on top of her, while Jean read through review work for their next cases; the TV is playing softly — the news, Emma thinks, but doesn’t check.

Jean is biting on the cap of a hilighter and thinking hard, and from this angle, Emma can’t escape it.

Jean Grey is absolutely beautiful in the mornings.  Her hair’s a mess, of course, and she isn’t wearing any makeup, but that doesn’t matter.

Emma closes her eyes again, and realizes that she’s lost.

—

New Year’s Eve is awkwardly held at Warren’s house. 

Jean’s not sure if she wants to go, because she knows that no matter what, Warren and Scott are going to feel awkward about it, and she’s not much for making people feel awkward.

Plus, there was Emma to deal with.  Emma, who’d disappeared out of the window while Jean had gone to the bathroom, gone like she’d never been there and leaving a warm spot on the bed as the only proof she had been.

Emma, diamond-hard, unreadable Emma, who laughed at all the right parts during  _Heathers_  and got righteously angry at gross boys and at bullies.

Emma who, until recently, had seemed like she hated her.

Jean sighed, and got ready for the party.  She wanted to see if Emma was going to be there, at least, and if she didn’t show up, that would probably make Scott and Warren feel awkward, too.

—

Emma wears her third-slinkiest dress to Warren’s New Year’s Party.  It’s tight from waist-to knee, but it’s white  and studded with rhinestones.  She piles her hair up high on her head and tells herself she looks every inch old, classic Hollywood.

She’s fifteen minutes late to the party, and when she gets there, she immediately starts looking for Jean.

Jean’s in the main lounge, talking to one of the infamous Maximoff Twins, Wanda, and she’s in a long, pale blue dress with a ruffled hem, her hair tamed but loose around her shoulders.

Emma is going to die.

She almost backs out of the room, but then Jean looks at her, and all she can think is that she is so, completely, and  _utterly_  fucked.

—

Jean almost drops her glass when she sees Emma dressed like that.  She looks…she looks gorgeous, and Jean knows that she can’t handle it without saying something.

Christ.  ”Uh, hi,” she says, waving at her.  ”You look, you look nice.”

Emma blinks twice, like she doesn’t realize Jean’s talking for her.  Something strange passes over her face, and she retreats out of the room without a word.

Jean goes as red as her hair, and Wanda laughs.

"I think you should probably go talk to her."

"Yeah, I should."

—

Oh, she’s done it now, she’s ruined everything.  She couldn’t even properly say  _hello_  to her, how is she supposed to ever look her in the eye again —

"Emma!" 

Emma whirls around, heels clicking on the wood floor.  It’s Jean, of course it’s Jean.

"You, you look really nice, and, uh, I wanted to thank you for coming over last night," Jean says, and she’s blushing.   _Blushing._

Emma’s mouth is desert dry, and she clears her throat.  ”Oh.  I — it was the least I could do.”

"It was nice.  I — why’d you leave so fast in the morning?"

She can’t do this, she can’t handle this.  ”I — well, I — I didn’t want to impose.”

She was also afraid that if she stayed any longer she’d’ve kissed her, right then and there.

"I wouldn’t have minded."  Jean is still blushing, and she glances away like she’s constructing an argument.  "I was — I was just wondering.  I don’t — I don’t have a midnight kiss lined up…"

Emma can’t breathe for a moment.  ”…You have no idea how cheesy that sounds, do you?”

"I do," Jean says, frowning.  "Is that a no?"

"Did I say no?"

—

Emma is still mysterious as ever, but there are butterflies in Jean’s stomach now.  ”No, you didn’t.”

"I would very much like to be your New Year’s Kiss," Emma says, and she’s blushing, and Jean is blushing —

And well, you couldn’t exactly blame Jean for being a few hours early, given the circumstances.  She walks over, closing the gap between them, and pulls Emma into a soft, tentative kiss.

"Oh," Emma breathes when it’s done.  "It’s not midnight yet."

"It’s gotta be, somewhere."

"Well, you’re going to have to do it again, when it’s midnight here."

"I was kind of hoping you’d say that."


End file.
